There’s something sinister and uncanny yet quietly revelatory in the isolated body fragments sculpted and painted by Los Angeles-based artist Shana Hoehn. The works in her latest show, “Sleepless,” at Make Room Los Angeles, drift through nocturnal dimensions, emerging with symbolic force as if from a dream—or from the abyss of a more collective subconscious. Derived from fallen trees in Pasadena, the show’s wall-based sculptures take shape as embodiments of both physical and psychological trauma. At once haunting and hybrid, they already suggest a fluid coexistence between human bodies and plant life. Indeed, the entire exhibition pulses with this tension—between embodiment and disembodiment, inner and outer worlds, the shell and the animated current of psychic energy within. Hoehn’s sculptures seem summoned by archetypal forces breaking into consciousness, manifesting with intensity and disruption as both ominous presences and secretions of repressed feelings and compulsions that have slipped past control.
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Hoehn’s accompanying paintings channel the same symbolic language, as the canvas provides a liminal space between intuition and premeditation—an arena where expression comes more immediately. “They function like icons or symbols rather than a full body,” the artist says as we walk through the show. These new works are composed of collaged canvas fragments and rubbings taken from Pasadena trees that fell during the last windstorm. “I like that the local landscape is imprinted in the cultural objects.” Completed over the past several months, the paintings have evolved into a poignant, sensitive testament to the ecological tragedy caused by the recent wildfires in Los Angeles. Though the trees are now gone, their ghostly presence lingers in Hoehn’s paintings.
All of the works in the show were made during a particularly difficult period for Hoehn, who endured months of sleeplessness while navigating profound loss and grief. The painfully contorted figures she sculpts seem to give shape to this psychological turmoil, acting as vessels for the remnants of unresolved trauma. Many of the sculptural presences reflect an intimate and often feminine bond between body and nature, invoking a visual imagination rooted in a girlhood psyche.
Carved wood braids twist into hunting tentacles, disembodied forms that menace as if poised to strangle external presences. At the same time, they conjure the image of tree branches steaming and pushing outward as they grow. Disjointed from any torso, cheerleaders’ legs hang acrobatically from the wall, frozen mid-jump. These sculptures function as vessels—conduits for memory—through which past experiences are reconfigured into hybrid symbolic imagery. In this transformation, they move beyond the personal to signal a more universal relationship between the human body and its environment. “There’s a place that I think most people go back to in their memories, a certain age,” Hoehn tells us. “For me, that’s between 12 and 15 years old, when the forest meant freedom, escape and a place for hiding.”
Her upbringing in East Texas surfaces throughout her work and visual vocabulary. The swampy, amphibious terrain, the heavy humid air, the cyclical rhythms of life, death and regeneration all permeate her sculptural and painterly language. “I’ve always been interested in working with the landscape in which I come from, this wooden, swampy area, but I’ve brought a lot more in the landscape I currently live in.” The paintings—dense with the same mystery, fear and subtle allegorical charge—were painted from life during daylight and then altered by the artist into darker, more ambiguous atmospheres. Each work exists in that undefinable, liminal space between sunrise and sunset, between light and shadow, between life and death.
She shares that she has long studied the crucifix as a symbol, repurposing its form and meaning throughout her work. Hoehn grew up deeply religious, which explains the faintly Catholic eschatological currents and symbologies that surface in her practice—wrestling with the tension between pain and redemption, bodily punishment and violence and the allure of ascetic elevation. The fragmented body, as rendered by Hoehn, already gestures toward the relics of saints and the iconography of martyrdom.
Many of Hoehn’s sculptures appear poised for transformation, their forms suggesting an imminent shift. Yet there is also an unmistakable sense of restraint, as if something within the work resists or represses this evolution, holding the figures in stasis. A latent violence pulses through the pieces as if the artist’s process itself were a cathartic exorcism of unspoken trauma. Masochistically stretched and contorted, her fragmented limbs, spines and breasts bend into emergent architectural structures—quietly confronting the vulnerability and hypersensitivity of flesh and the peril of a not fully conscious, or even coerced, experience of embodiment.
Across works, shells and cocoons emerge as symbols of shelter—at once protective and repressive, containing within them both the potential and the constraint of further transformation. In multiple sculptures, holes recur as ambiguous motifs: chasms and traps, but also nests and hiding places. “There are both ominous holes, which are swallowing things. But then, a lot of these holes also became these places for birth and rebirth,” Shana says, gesturing toward I Give Birth to Myself (2025), a moody painting in which a figure with long, flowing hair and a bare back hunches in sorrow or introspection, either emerging from a tree or collapsing into its embrace. In another work, Untitled (2024–2025), two female bodies hang in uneasy postures in front of the gaping maw of a tree. “There’s this bad vortex, where someone is sucked in, but it’s also an intimate place,” the artist adds. As shadow gorges, these openings function like portals for invisible forces.
Enigmatic symbolic fragments are carefully scattered across the gallery in a calibrated choreography of dual forces, as Hoehn confronts themes of mortality, impermanence and the possibility of regeneration. “The braids and the trees almost have a similar relationship in this work, as well as the cocoons—they all convey this idea of suffocation and restriction, or something that can allow transformation,” she says.
Circulating through a constant exchange of disembodiment, embodiment and transformation, the physical and psychological experiences in Hoehn’s work appear already estranged from the fugitive, existential essence of the body. Decaying organic matter, the skeletal remnants of dead trees, the tension in a strained pose—all convey the precarity of being while simultaneously contemplating the regenerative systems embedded in nature’s resilience.
Shana Hoehn’s “Sleepless” is on view at Make Room, Los Angeles, through April 5, 2025.
